Pages

Monday, 16 September 2013

You Are Really Small

(Hey guys, I know we don't have a massive audience yet, but i wanted to make sure that we kept posting regularly - so as Yath wasn't able to post, I filled in :) nothing to do with tech though!)

Have you ever looked around and up and just thought about how small you are? I know there are much smaller things in life, things we cannot see and things we struggle to even measure, but we are really really small… I was on a flight to Malaysia when it suddenly hit me just how small we are…

If you live in London, you know it’s quite easy to walk from one place to another… I can walk to a lot of my friends’ houses in thirty minutes, some friends may take an hour to walk to… but it’s doable… However, walking from one town to another is long - for example, for me to walk from my house to my old secondary school would have taken around 3 to 4 hours… but by car it’s easy? with no traffic, i could drive in less than twenty minutes… but then when you think about going from one side of London to the other, again it’s a strenuous journey… For example, going from Uxbridge to Borough will take over an hour, but by train it’s an easy journey… Then when you think about going from one side of England to the other, for example London to Manchester, a car is just way too long, a train is easier but still a bit long but a plane makes life just so easy… I think London to Manchester by car is 5 hours, by train is 3 hours and by plane is half an hour… Yet to get from London to Malaysia, the plane still took 12 hours…

This plane that can go from one side of England to the other in less than an hour still has to fly constantly for 12 hours to get to Malaysia, and that’s not even the farthest country! Assuming you do not need to refuel, a plane will take around 47 hours to go around the whole world… 2 days… At 550mph… The world is just so damn big… And then the scale just keeps getting bigger… We have the moon, that’s ‘near’ us… You know in diagrams, the moon and earth are pretty close together:

Well, that’s complete bullsh*t… I mean, the moon is pretty close relative to Mars, but if the Earth was a football you held up, the moon would be a tennis ball that would be more than a bedroom size distance away… This is a closer scale:

Then we got our solar system… I can’t even imagine the distance from the Sun to Pluto… It’s just impossible - obviously, I can tell you it’s 5.9 billion km away, but can you imagine it? I genuinely can’t… And then, we got our galaxy… where there’s a f*ck load of solar systems… and distances goes from unimaginable to just stupid… and then, there’s a f*ck load of galaxies… and when you think at the beginning of this, i was saying walking to my school was long, this just blows my mind… We start measuring in lightyears - the distance light travels in a year… It just gets crazy because in normal day life, we don’t even think light travels, it just appears lol… Even from the Moon to Earth it only takes a second… Yet the stars we see above us are usually hundreds of lightyears away…

When you think about extraterrestrial life, a lot of people just say ‘nah, we would have discovered it already’ but if you think about it, that’s like holding a drop of water on your finger and saying ‘there’s no such thing as whales because there’s none in this drop of water’...